The Secret Dinner

“Dante is my name. You’ll need to remember that. Even after you’re halfway through this story, after you find out what happened and decide I’m nothing more than a worthless piece of shit, I’ll need you to remember: My name is Dante and I was once a nice guy.”

Dante addresses the reader directly with second-person directives, “You’ll need to remember,” turning his narrative into a plea for a fair hearing before the damning facts arrive. The insistence that he “was once a nice guy” uses past tense to acknowledge his own transformation, previewing the corrosive arc that the novel will trace. This opening functions as an unreliable narrator’s preemptive defense, asking for sympathy he may not ultimately deserve by the story’s end.

“To this day, I’m fascinated by this riddle. What I can’t get out of my head isn’t the death of the guy’s wife, or the fact that he thought he was eating a seagull when really it was his poor wife, or even the fact that he killed himself over it. What fascinates me is that the husband ate human flesh and didn’t know it. And what’s more: He liked it.”

This fixation establishes the psychological premise underlying the entire plot: Knowledge of a food’s origins can alter how its consumption is understood, and pleasure is a visceral response independent of conscious knowledge. The short, blunt final sentence, “He liked it,” isolates the detail that Dante finds most compelling, previewing his own later willingness to deceive diners about what they’re eating. This fascination with the riddle becomes the template for the business that the friends will build, turning a dark thought experiment into a commercial scheme that illustrates the theme of The Hypocrisy of Meat Consumption.

“In that moment, I felt lucky. There was still a long road ahead, but I’d taken the first step toward a brighter future. I would achieve everything there was to achieve, I would be rich, successful, and independent. Goodbye, rural, homophobic hometown! Goodbye, Mother and your snark! In that apartment, it felt like nothing could go wrong. Boy, was I mistaken.”

This early declaration that he would be “rich, successful, and independent” captures the ordinary, sympathetic ambition that will later curdle into monstrous enterprise, grounding Dante’s downfall in recognizable desires. The anaphora of “Goodbye” signals his eagerness to sever ties with his past, an impulse that nonetheless can’t keep him from returning to Pingo d’Água later in the novel, more diminished. The blunt closing sentence, “Boy, was I mistaken,” uses the retrospective narrator’s hindsight to undercut his youthful optimism, a device that the novel repeats throughout to remind readers that this is a confession written after catastrophe.

“Here in Brazil we eat cows but not horses. In France, they eat horses, but they don’t eat dogs. And did you know that in India they eat dogs but not cows? To each his own. Truth is, eating meat is just too good to resist.”

Here, Cora rattles off a list of cultural taboos around meat to normalize her own appetite and preempt judgment before her experience with butchery becomes central to the group’s plans. Her clipped catalog of contradictory customs argues that disgust is culturally constructed, a claim that the novel will later literalize once she begins butchering human bodies with the same matter-of-fact tone. Her blunt conclusion, that “eating meat is just too good to resist,” makes her the novel’s clearest early voice for the theme of The Hypocrisy of Meat Consumption, long before the reader learns how far she’s willing to go to profit from it.

“‘Remember that riddle you told us about the seagull meat?’ 

[…] 

‘I don’t know why, man, but that stuck in my head,’ Piglet said. ‘So, like, as a prank, I decided to mess with the registration form Hugo asked me to fill out on SecretDinner.co. Instead of charging five hundred a head, I set the price at three thousand. And…instead of saying there would be lamb with a vodka and green apple reduction, I said there would be…human meat.’”

Piglet’s confession that the riddle “stuck in [his] head” establishes a connection between Dante’s fascination with the riddle and Piglet’s proposal, turning an abstract puzzle into a literal business model. The casual phrase “as a prank” underscores how flippantly the group’s descent into atrocity begins, treating what will become mass murder as an afterthought to a joke gone too far. This moment operationalizes the novel’s central symbol since the riddle that once interested Dante as an intellectual curiosity now supplies the blueprint for an actual crime.

“Piglet and Hugo looked at each other. They had much more they wanted to say but decided against it. There was a lot I should have said. Like how ‘The Case of the Speluncean Explorers’ is actually inspired by true events. How the four defendants were acquitted but then put right back on trial years later because they’d killed and eaten other people. How they’d gotten hooked on eating humans. How they couldn’t stop. Human flesh is addictive. That’s what I should have said, but I didn’t. For that thirty thousand, I kept my mouth shut, too.”

Dante’s reference to “The Case of the Speluncean Explorers,” a legal hypothetical by Lon L. Fuller, establishes a comparison between survival cannibalism and the roommates’ proposed dinner. However, the circumstances differ considerably: The explorers face starvation, while Dante and his friends are attempting to resolve a financial crisis. His subsequent account of the explorers becoming addicted to human flesh extends the comparison beyond the original hypothetical, introducing the possibility that an act initially justified by necessity may become habitual. His admission that he withheld this information “for that thirty thousand” reveals his willingness to suppress concerns that might jeopardize the dinner. The passage develops The Corrosive Nature of Unchecked Ambition by showing how Dante’s financial motivations already influence the information he shares with his friends.

“‘Not a knife. Buy me a chainsaw. That’s what I like to work with. Makes it easier to split the carcass.’ 

‘Deal.’ 

‘Make it yellow.’ 

‘Yellow?’ 

‘Yeah…canary yellow. It’s my favorite color,’ she said, grinning like a kid in a candy store. ‘I want a canary-yellow chainsaw.’”

This exchange introduces the yellow chainsaw that becomes one of the novel’s most disturbing symbols, as Cora requests a cheerful color for a tool whose sole purpose is dismembering human bodies. Her glee, “grinning like a kid in a candy store,” reveals a detachment from violence so complete that the instrument of butchery becomes an object of personal taste, later customized further with pop-culture stickers. The juxtaposition of childlike enthusiasm and gruesome function captures how casually the characters have normalized atrocity, treating murder as simply another line item in their business.

“Don’t be stupid…That woman was already dead. After death, every animal is the same. You’re funny, you know that? If meat comes in a package covered in plastic wrap, you don’t care. You just grab it, fry it, and eat it without a second thought about where it came from. And now you’re over in the corner bitching and moaning. You know what? The only difference is I’m not a hypocrite like you.”

Cora dismantles Dante’s squeamishness by pointing to the plastic-wrapped anonymity of supermarket meat, arguing that willful ignorance separates ordinary consumers from what the group is doing. Her accusation that Dante is a “hypocrite” turns his disgust back on him since he eats meat without tracing its violent origin yet recoils at seeing the process made visible. This direct address crystallizes the novel’s argument about the theme of The Hypocrisy of Meat Consumption, collapsing the distinction between sanctioned and taboo violence into a matter of packaging and distance.

“Albertina closed her eyes and brought the fork with a substantial chunk of meat to her mouth. As I lifted the other cloches, I watched every subtle movement on her face. She blew on it briefly, then her teeth grabbed hold of the meat and sank into it, her mouth soaked with saliva, her rosy cheeks inflated and deflated as she chewed. […] Noticing all the rings on her fingers, I couldn’t help but find a certain similarity between female embellishment and the seasonings in the dinner. They were just different ways of preparing meat.”

Montes’s detailed description of Albertina eating emphasizes the physical processes underlying the dinner’s elaborate presentation. Dante focuses on her mouth, saliva, and chewing, contrasting the meal’s refined social setting with the bodily act of consumption. His comparison between Albertina’s jewelry and the seasonings used to prepare the meat extends this association, treating personal adornment and culinary preparation as related forms of presentation. The observation also reveals Dante’s increasingly objectifying perspective, as he momentarily regards a dinner guest through the same language used to describe the food. The passage therefore connects the novel’s treatment of consumption to its broader examination of how people are reduced to objects of pleasure and display.

“‘You are a mediator, Dante, a justice of the peace. You promised that couple you’d swap out the meat on their plates for normal steak, but you didn’t. They ate human flesh; they just didn’t know it. That was smart, kid. I like smart people.’ 

Umberto finished his cigar and left it in the ashtray on the coffee table. 

[…] 

‘Don’t torment yourself, kid. You did well to fool those two,’ he said before walking away. ‘The world belongs to the bold, not the cowardly.’”

Umberto reframes Dante’s deception of Kássio and Gustavo as admirable cleverness, directly echoing the seagull-meat riddle’s premise that pleasure can survive ignorance of the truth. Calling Dante a “mediator” and “justice of the peace” inverts the terms’ usual meaning since Dante has actually protected himself at the frightened couple’s expense. Umberto’s closing aphorism, that “the world belongs to the bold, not the cowardly,” functions as a corrupting creed that Dante will absorb over the following months, illustrating the theme of The Corrosive Nature of Unchecked Ambition as moral cowardice is recast as boldness.

“Spoon the reduction onto the plate, place meat in the center and apples on the side. Sprinkle with citrus zest. 

For a more exotic and flavorful dish, substitute the lamb entrecôte with 7 pounds of human gluteus maximus. 

Serves 10”

The recipe’s deadpan final instruction, to “substitute the lamb entrecôte with 7 pounds of human gluteus maximus,” exploits the genre conventions of a cookbook, using precise culinary measurements and brisk imperatives to normalize cannibalism as a simple ingredient swap. Embedding this horror within an ordinary interlude of ingredients and oven temperatures forces the reader to recognize how little formal difference exists between preparing lamb and preparing a person once euphemism and procedure take over. This structural juxtaposition of mundane recipe and monstrous content literalizes the theme of The Hypocrisy of Meat Consumption, showing that technique governs what counts as food.

“‘You have to believe me. It was an accident! I looked in his pockets, but he had no wallet, no ID, nothing, not even some spare change. He was homeless. And that’s when I had the idea…’ 

‘To serve the guy you just ran over.’ 

‘I mean, he was already dead and…’ Hugo cracked a tiny grin, a jarring contrast to the rest of his troubled expression. ‘A homeless guy is pretty much a stray animal.’”

Hugo’s grin as he minimizes his hit-and-run murder, calling his unhoused victim “pretty much a stray animal,” marks the moment when his ambition fully eclipses his conscience, as he reduces a human life to the same category as roadkill. The casual register of his confession, delivered between justifications about having “no wallet, no ID,” reveals how quickly rationalization follows violence once profit is at stake. This dehumanizing comparison previews Hugo’s later embrace of Umberto’s business, charting his arc under the theme of The Corrosive Nature of Unchecked Ambition from talented chef to willing murderer.

“Brazil exports a lot of things, Dante. Carnival, soccer, caipirinhas. Good-looking women, whores. It’s time we started exporting our cuisine. We’ve got way too many people on this planet. China is all fucked up from overpopulation. Africa, India…Have you seen how many beggars are out there on the street? What about the favelas? They’re crawling like anthills! And what about all these lazy bums, freeloaders living off welfare. Government handouts, affirmative action, who knows what else. Round up all these people and slice them up into steaks. Carpaccio. Chicken-fried deadbeat. It will revolutionize the culinary world. And it will be a good way to clear things out, a true cleansing.”

In this monologue, Umberto weaponizes the language of overpopulation and welfare resentment to justify mass murder as a form of social hygiene, revealing how easily bigotry disguises itself as pragmatic business strategy. His glib phrases, “carpaccio” and “chicken-fried deadbeat,” turn marginalized people into menu items through wordplay that trivializes their suffering as market innovation. This speech exposes the theme of The Monstrous Violence of Modern Capitalism at its most explicit, as Umberto frames the extermination of the poor as efficient resource management and a “true cleansing.”

“‘The concept of cannibalism has been sullied; it has a very negative semantic charge. Just the mention of it and people immediately think of that guy who volunteered to be eaten online, or Hannibal Lecter, or that death cult in the Northeast who sold human empanadas. Empanadas, for Christ’s sake! What a way to cook a delicacy!’ 

[…] 

‘I’m saying we need to put an end to its correlation with savagery and evil. Right now, it’s taboo. Take the word queer: It had a pejorative meaning in the past, but that’s no longer the case. The value people place on certain flavors is a cultural thing. For example, why is caviar more expensive than cassava? Both are divine delicacies! Human flesh is also divine; it has the most intense flavor of all. That’s what we need to show people.’”

Umberto’s comparison of “cannibalism” to the reclaimed term “queer” is a cynical analogy, co-opting the language of social progress to rebrand mass murder as a misunderstood taste. His rhetorical question about caviar and cassava relies on false equivalence, conflating cultural snobbery about food with literal murder to make his business sound like a matter of marketing. This speech exemplifies how the novel uses Umberto as a mouthpiece for the theme of The Monstrous Violence of Modern Capitalism since he genuinely believes that sufficient branding can make any atrocity palatable.

“Once everyone had arrived, I would come out to welcome them, wearing a tuxedo with my hair gelled. 

‘It’s a pleasure to welcome you to this exclusive occasion. My name is Sidney and I’m here to make sure you’ll have the best night of your lives. I hope you enjoy yourselves. I’m sure you have a lot of questions—most do the first time. You can ask whatever you like, but please don’t forget to use the term seagull instead of…you know…’ 

At that moment, everyone always giggled, exchanging glances.”

In this welcome speech, Dante instructs guests to use “the term seagull instead of…you know,” institutionalizing euphemism as a shared ritual that binds host and diner together in collective denial. The guests’ giggling response shows how readily they accept this linguistic cover, treating the substitution as a playful inside joke. This scene crystallizes the function of the “seagull meat” euphemism throughout the novel, a code phrase that lets everyone at the table participate in cannibalism while maintaining psychological distance from what they’re actually doing.

“‘Why do you keep doing these dinners?’ he insisted. ‘It’s not about the money anymore, is it?’ 

‘What?’ 

‘You like it, don’t you?’ 

‘Fuck you, Miguel!’ 

‘Sorry, I…I’m just confused, I feel like you guys forced me into this.’ 

‘We were up against a wall, man!’ 

‘I’m afraid of what could happen,’ Miguel said, tears streaming down his face. He got up and looked at me, his eyes red. ‘Just promise me we won’t turn into monsters, Dante. Promise.’ 

I promised.”

Miguel’s question, “You like it, don’t you?,” punctures Dante’s claim that the dinners are purely financial necessity, forcing him to confront a motivation that he has been unwilling to name aloud. Dante’s defensive outburst, “Fuck you, Miguel!,” reveals how close the accusation lands to the truth since his drug use and enthusiasm for hosting have clearly outpaced any economic justification. Miguel’s final plea, “promise me we won’t turn into monsters,” takes on a foreboding weight in retrospect since he’s murdered months later for gathering evidence against the very group he begs to stay human.

“‘You always knew deep down these people were getting killed—it was just better to believe that story I made up. It was willful ignorance, Dante, conscious unconsciousness, because you could finally afford the life you always wanted.’ 

[…] 

‘No need to beat yourself up, kid. It’s the very same instinct that keeps you from killing an animal but has you hungry for its meat at the store. We all live on a hypocritical diet, soothed by whatever tastes good. We feel sorry for the little piggies and baby cows, but we love a nice, juicy steak. My father used to quote some philosopher that “beauty is in the details, but cruelty prefers abstraction.” He was right.’”

The paradox in Umberto’s phrase “conscious unconsciousness” names the exact mechanism sustaining the entire cannibal enterprise: a willed ignorance that lets participants enjoy profit and pleasure without confronting the violence underwriting them. His attributed aphorism, that “beauty is in the details, but cruelty prefers abstraction,” extends this idea, suggesting that distance and euphemism make atrocity bearable in a way that close attention never could. By tying Dante’s complicity to the same impulse that lets ordinary people “feel sorry for the little piggies and baby cows” while still eating steak, Umberto voices the novel’s argument for The Hypocrisy of Meat Consumption at its most self-justifying.

“I paused to look at the machines, their whir of chains lifting bodies through the air on hooks. That loud metal clanging mingled with the squeals of animals from neighboring stalls, and the cries for help from the people dragged into that place. At the same time, there was this false sense of comfort brought about by the sterile, white cleanliness and the synchronization of the machines. The technology was stripping people of their humanity and turning them into objects on a production line.”

The auditory imagery of “clanging” machinery mixed with animal squeals and human “cries for help” collapses any distinction between the species being processed, rendering the slaughterhouse as a single undifferentiated system of violence. Dante’s observation that the facility’s “sterile, white cleanliness” produces a “false sense of comfort” shows how industrial order can mask horror more effectively than chaos ever could. This passage makes literal the novel’s governing metaphor for the theme of The Monstrous Violence of Modern Capitalism, in which bureaucratic efficiency and technological synchronization strip victims of their humanity and reduce them to interchangeable units on a line.

“‘Not long after the rumors started, one of the prostitutes got into a fight with Jorge’s mother and she started telling everyone that it was all true, that Madam Adélia used to serve the truck drivers for dinner at the brothel. Anything to get rid of the bodies.’ 

I went pale, and my mother gripped my hands. 

‘Now you understand why it wasn’t easy having Jorge live here with us,’ she went on. ‘It always used to make me nervous seeing him overweight like that, I’d think about how that poor little boy might have been eating human flesh all those years, not knowing it. He was just a child, can you imagine? It’s awful, isn’t it? Just awful.’”

Dante’s mother delivers this revelation in a hushed, gossipy register, treating mass murder and cannibalism at the brothel as small-town lore. Her detail that Piglet might have unknowingly eaten human flesh “all those years” as a child directly echoes the seagull-meat riddle that opens the novel, suggesting that Piglet’s later crimes have roots stretching back to before he ever met Dante. This revelation retroactively recontextualizes Piglet’s fixation on food and his casual cruelty, implying that his eventual role as the mastermind behind the cannibal dinners may be an inheritance.

“‘I had to make a choice, Dante,’ said Hugo, his head still hanging. ‘There’s no such thing as good food without sacrifice.’ 

‘You’re a piece of shit, Hugo. You’re a moron who doesn’t know what friendship is, you never knew what it means to be family…I can’t even fucking look at you!’ 

He looked up at me with red eyes. 

‘I’m moving out. I already packed my clothes.’ 

‘Those sons of bitches killed Piglet!’ 

‘Nobody in Pingo d’Água needs to know. He had no relatives; we were his only friends. Nobody will miss him.’ 

‘I will!’ 

‘This is all very touching,’ said Umberto, interrupting our argument in a honeyed, insincere voice. ‘But you also have a choice to make, Dante. You can’t keep playing the double agent, working against us. Vladimir wants to give you one last shot before he takes more…extreme action.’”

Hugo’s justification, that “there’s no such thing as good food without sacrifice,” reduces Piglet’s apparent murder to a culinary principle, revealing how fully his artistic self-image has displaced any sense of friendship or guilt. His casual dismissal that “nobody will miss” Piglet because “he had no relatives” echoes the chilling calculus of the slaughterhouse’s selection of victims without families. Umberto’s interruption, framing the exchange as “touching” before issuing Dante an ultimatum to kill Arthur, demonstrates how personal betrayal and corporate menace have become indistinguishable within the operation.

“‘Your godfather is Vladimir, Dante,’ he said. ‘Ruth died because she saw this photo. It was in her email, in a folder called “Secret Dinner.” I only got access yesterday.’

So it was true. Vladimir was Umberto, and he’d been making a fool of me all this time. Piglet had been murdered because he’d confirmed his suspicions. It occurred to me in that moment that maybe Miguel had also known. But how?”

Arthur’s revelation collapses weeks of investigation into a single image, confirming Dante’s growing suspicion that Umberto and Vladimir are one person. Dante’s interior monologue, “So it was true,” registers relief at finally having an answer, which the novel later undercuts when Cora reveals that Vladimir was actually a fiction invented by Piglet to control the business from behind a human scapegoat. This passage marks the limit of Dante’s detective work since even his seemingly definitive discovery turns out to be another layer of manipulation he never fully escapes.

“I read later that carbamate acts like a fire inside the body, burning through everything in its path, while warfarin is an efficient anti-coagulant, opening the doors for the fire to spread. A second jet of vomit spewed from Ataíde’s mouth, speckled with little pieces of seagull meat and unchewed artichoke, but this time no one complained, as they had bigger concerns, like breathing. […] 

Later, the newspapers chose not to mention that the widow to the famed industrialist Péricles Terranova, a lady who was a fixture of Brazilian high society, died shitting herself as she told the whole world to go fuck itself.”

Montes renders mass death through gallows humor and visceral imagery, as Ataíde vomits up bits of “unchewed artichoke” and the prose clinically explains how carbamate “acts like a fire inside the body.” The narrator’s aside that newspapers “chose not to mention” the full indignity of Albertina’s death exposes a further hypocrisy, in which even a massacre of the elite gets sanitized for public consumption after the fact. This scene operates as class satire, turning Rio’s wealthiest citizens into the same kind of helpless, degraded bodies that their business has spent the novel reducing other people to.

“‘That lunch…’ he said, pointing at Umberto. ‘Was it human flesh we were eating?’ 

I got on my knees and opened my arms wide: 

‘You can kill me now, Arthur. You don’t need me anymore.’ 

He nodded with a small smile that was no longer sadistic but tormented. Moving decisively, he grabbed the chainsaw from a corner and restarted it. I shut my eyes as the vroommmm, vroommmm, vroommmm approached. I decided not to react. It was Arthur’s right. 

‘Your punishment will be to go on living,’ he whispered, right in my mutilated ear. 

A spew of liquid flooded my face. There was nothing I could’ve done. I opened my eyes to him drowning in his own blood, his throat sliced with the chainsaw.”

Arthur’s decision to spare Dante before dying by suicide reverses the expectation that their confrontation will end with Dante’s death. His declaration that Dante’s punishment is “to go on living” establishes survival itself as a consequence of his involvement in the dinners. Dante initially accepts the possibility of being killed, believing that Arthur has the right to punish him for Ruth’s death. By refusing to grant this request, Arthur leaves Dante to confront the consequences of his actions without offering him a final resolution through death. The passage also returns to the novel’s opening confession, connecting the events at the villa to Dante’s subsequent imprisonment and his attempt to explain his participation in the enterprise.